Are Our Brains Wired Together? The Power of the Mind in Business & Beyond with Moran Cerf, Neuroscientist & Professor

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to neuroscientist and professor Moran Cerf about the signals that connect all of our minds, how that shapes every area of life, and Joel finally gets an answer to his question: what are the humans building? You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:25) So the way that this got started was I was doing an interview on these guys who created this concept called promise theory to organize swarms of artificial intelligence. And they started finding that they were acting like ants, and they went on this whole tangent. And my thought was, okay, I understand that the ants are all receiving this signal and they're taking these actions. But if you walk up to an individual ant and ask them, they're probably going to shrug at you and be like, I don't know. I'm just doing what I want to do. And then I was wondering, like, do humans work like that? Is that a potential for how humans work? And is anyone studying this model? We did research. We found you. And I want to know how you got involved with studying this.

(Moran Cerf at 00:01:12) And the games begin. So I'll say that there's a body of research, all, I would say, 10 years old, that looks at activity of groups generally. Before we get to humans, I'm kind of building towards the climax in a second. So they looked at some animals that operate in concert as if they have a single mind at the same time, while we know that each of them is an individual. So you can think of schools of fish or flocks of birds or there's some kind of bees that operate in groups of ants, and they all have this thing where they, from the outside, seem like they all do one big thing together. But every now and then, you ask the question, who started it? And who's the brain of everything and so on? And you cannot find that. Every little ant thinks it's just doing its own thing, but they somehow end up all walking in the same direction. So they started to kind of identify that there's no particular leader, but they're kind of like majority votes, almost. Like when the birds fly together, at some point, one deviates a little bit, and then another one by chance deviates a little bit. And before long, if you have three of them do that, then all the ones behind them kind of start to do the same thing. And before long, you have a break from the flock and they can come together. And once we started to do that, we went back to humans and said, okay, let's take an organization. What does it take for an organization to, say, have, you can think about it as a mutiny or innovation. But we all go in one direction, and at some point, some people say, hey, we should do something else. And either it takes off and now we have a pivot or total collapse and two parties in the same thing. And what we essentially looked at is how many sub brains do you need in order for you to fork, and what needs to happen to those groups of brains to work together. And now I can start kind of the climax, which is we found that typically for a leader to take the course and separate, you need to have at least one of the following things that worked for them. Either they have to be considered by others as an authority. Like everyone says, yeah, there's a CEO, but there's this one dude that everyone knows he knows everything about the company because he's been here the longest, or he's the smartest, or he knows the code perfectly, or in the past year, twice he made the right choice and we remember that. It's the kind of guy that even though everyone thought left, he thought right and it was right. There needs to be something like that that works. And the kind of ideal thing is, of course, if they're charismatic or if they're funny, if they have one more thing that works for them that says not just the authority, but also the ability to essentially create motion. And those are the things that apparently apply to bees and birds and fish, but also to humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:03) Interesting. Okay. So, you know, what's fun is that you can, as you were talking about in the corporate world, you can get the group to shift and have that shift be disconnected from reality, and then that group runs into reality and everything comes crashing down.

(Moran Cerf at 00:04:23) Exactly. And I think that the interesting thing to me is that in many cases, it's not the person that has the official authority that drives this thing. It's the person who sees reality the way it is. You know, you have a lot of cases, totally different domain now, but kind of similar, where you have, say, a disease and it requires the modern medicine approach to be different. You need to kind of change something. And there are authorities and senior doctors and so on, but they all know one way. And it takes one rogue doctor who says we should do it the opposite way. And because at the end of the day, it actually heals people, then this rogue person becomes the leader because reality is true for both sides. So essentially, once you kind of have two options, whatever is the truth typically wins.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:15) Interesting. So so far, this is like individual intelligence seeking, syncing up with other intelligence around them. Is there any evidence of an external signal being broadcast to all of the population?

(Moran Cerf at 00:05:31) So there's a, put an asterisk on the question of intelligence, because I'll say that as a side note, AI can play a part here equally. So we had experiments where seven humans are debating and they don't know that one of those humans was replaced by AI and they just keep talking. And at some point, this other intelligent thing gives an advice, and we asked the question, when is the fact that you know it's an AI versus not know it's AI makes you take their advice. So a board of seven people, one of them is replaced by an AI, no one knows. It's still kind of an email exchange between other people, but the AI says let's go left where everyone says go right, and you don't know it's an AI or you do know it's an AI, what happens? Put an asterisk. We can go back to that if you care about AI as an intelligence in a second. And I'll say that to the kind of more general question of like what needs to happen, I think there's a lot about what we call homophily. So it works best if of the, say, 100 individuals in the organization, the person who takes the side track and offers an alternative is similar to you in some way, shape, or form. It makes you see yourself in them. It could be that they have the same name as you. I'm making up one. Could be that they have the same birth date. It could be that they like the same soccer team. It could be that they are from the same city. If you're in New York and you both come from Hope, Arkansas, then you find something in that person that makes you see yourself in them. It increases the chances that when they say let's go left versus right, you will at least hear that and consider that. Whereas if it's someone that you see from the mainstream group or not your homophilic group, you are less likely to even consider that. If you ask me to elaborate one sentence, I know that I'm hijacking this thing, I'll say that this kind of creates a thought process that some companies should consider, which is do you want to hire people that think the same? In which case there's a good chance that if someone has a good idea, then it would be easy for them to rally everyone behind that. Or a diverse team where you say, you know what? I want a lot of ideas. It's likely that no one's going to want to follow anyone else because they're all going to have a team of rivals, we call it. But maybe there's a chance that a good idea would come. And the answer to that, to kind of give the audience a quick narrative, is it very much depends on the task and the type of company. If your company is Ferrari and you're in the pit stop and your job is to change the tires and put gas in as fast as possible, you might want the entire 10 people who replace the tires to be pretty much the same brain duplicated 10 times. So when I do this, you put the tool in my hand because you read my mind before I even did it and you already know what I'm going to ask for, and it's just working in concert perfectly. But if you're in the marketing department of Chase and your job is to think of new ideas to sell a bank, then you might want 10 different thoughts that when someone sells a second idea, you're going to have one from left, one from right, one from the opposite, and you'll essentially have a broader spectrum. So based on the task, you might want diversity or homophily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:44) The act of knowing what to choose when to choose it, obviously you can lump it into leadership as a whole. But is there a specific study of this or farther reading people can learn about? Or is this just a single talking point?

(Moran Cerf at 00:09:00) Anecdotal, but I'll say one thing that we're learning recently that I think would be interesting and novel because it's kind of coming from the lab as we speak rather than, there's a tendency for leaders who have failed before to be better in coming up with those good ideas next. So we kind of think of failure in this context as a learning step that is pretty useful. We think, you know, if you fail, maybe you don't get the second chance because we think of you as a failure. What we saw is that a failing CEO, a failing leader who actually kind of recovers and now comes again, the knowledge from the failure carries a positive outcome on their likelihood of making less mistakes in the future, being more conscious of the type of things that are indicators of decline ahead of time. So there's something about that which is kind of intuitive. A failing previous CTO, CEO, someone, is actually a good person to put on your team if you're thinking of a direction change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) I'll include that in my next venture capital pitch.

(Moran Cerf at 00:10:03) Exactly. Say, I'm a real loser. Can I, that's my pitch? I'm a real, here are all my losses and all my failures, like, now, now, now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:11) You know what? After having been an entrepreneur my entire life and building three different businesses, I could tell you that there is so much failure. Like, if I was going to give my money to somebody, I would want them to have some experience failing because at least they know what it's like to stare into the abyss and eat the glass. You know?

(Moran Cerf at 00:10:32) I agree. And I think that, I mean, it's probably not new to the biggest investor, but I'll say that having as a first question, kind of, tell us about a big failure and how did you deal with that? And what did you learn from that? And how would you avoid doing next time? It's actually a great interview question for a future investor in an entrepreneur to kind of know a little bit how they think about it. It's something that we still have stigma around it, and maybe people kind of try to put it out until they are super successful and then they kind of take it into the TED talk about how my failures became, well, today. But at some point there's like a sweet spot where I think people should move a little bit towards the sweet spot to say, hey, failures on the table, kind of encouraged, as long as you can say, hey, this is what I learned from that and I'll do it better next time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) I'm not failing. I'm writing my TED Talk. That's what I have.

(Moran Cerf at 00:11:23) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:26) It sounds like a lot of your research centers around organizational development. Is that how you financially get money to study this stuff? How does that work?

(Moran Cerf at 00:11:36) So now the personal story is a bit unusual. So kind of not sure if it's a lesson about me or about life. I'm a neuroscientist. I study the brain. I am known, I would say, or my claim to fame as a researcher is actually being one of the few who study the brain in a pretty unusual way. I'll tell you in a second what it is. But this unusual way allowed us to really understand the brain in ways that are not common and unusual among neuroscientists so that we can have different insights about the brain. So I'll tell you what it is. But then among the small group of people who do what I do, which is already tiny compared to the big circle, I figured out that my expertise, my kind of what I'm drawn to, is real-world applications. So it's not enough for me to publish a paper. I wanted to see someone using it in the real world and actually making kind of concrete outputs with that. And so I chose to deviate from that tiny group I was part of already and to go to a business school where I get to interface commonly and frequently with companies and leaders of companies and essentially come to them with one piece of knowledge they don't get elsewhere, which is how their brain works or how their clients' brains work, and teach them something about that. How to think like a group, how to understand your own psyche and so on. And I think a neuroscientist in a business school is probably an equal one. It's not a popular thing from both sides. The business school don't like us and the neuroscientists think it's like, what are you doing with your brain going to help?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:08) You're making money is what you're doing. That's what you're doing. That's a good business model.

(Moran Cerf at 00:13:12) It has good things and bad things. I can rant and also praise. The rant, if you want, is that because there are so few of us, maybe, you know, single hand of a number of people, then there's a lot less interaction. And it's a lot more time is spent essentially proving to others that they should listen to you. So the CEO of Chase knows how to talk to an accounting professor, knows how to talk to a marketing professor. He doesn't know what to do with a neuroscientist. He has to be kind of told and learn a little bit about that. So that's the negative. The positive, I would say, is that when you get that, there's a lot of interest and it's really easy to kind of do a lot more. Like, when if you get one big bank or if you get one huge pharmaceutical company to actually bring the C-suite to talk to a neuroscientist, you can actually shape a lot bigger things. You really can, you know, change the trajectory of thinking on large scale. And also financially, it's a whole different game where my friends and colleagues from neuroscience spend a lot of their time writing grants, essentially begging for money. If you talk to the head of, we started with Chase, I think, let's now make it Bank of America, and you prove to them that there's something meaningful, then the checks have two more zeros in them, and all they require is like one phone call and they're okay with that. You wanted to hear about the unique thing in neuroscience? So I will kind of explain this mystery that I put as a spoiler earlier that something is different about our neuroscience work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) Yeah. What is that? What are you doing?

(Moran Cerf at 00:14:50) The title is we put neural implants in people's brains. So that's the kind of headline. And what it means is we work with humans who undergo brain surgery and agree to let us put a chip inside their head or electrodes inside their brain while their skull is open for clinical purposes and essentially decode their thoughts while they're awake and behaving. So we can see exactly how they think about money or how they make decisions or how they deal with failure and so on. That's extremely unusual. Most neuroscientists either study animals where you can open their brain and look inside because they're not humans, or if they want to study humans, they do it with imaging. So they look at fMRI or EEG. They look at the outside of the brain and try to infer what's going on inside. It's extremely unusual to have a person who agrees to let you drill a hole in their skull and put electrodes inside and see how they think. And that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) How are you getting these people to do this? Are they having other surgery that you just put it in while you, how long is it staying in for?

(Moran Cerf at 00:15:50) I was going to say I go to podcasts and I try to draw the audience to in the comments volunteer. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:57) We're going to put Josh. Josh, there you go.

(Moran Cerf at 00:16:00) The way we do it is we use patients who undergo brain surgery for clinical purposes first. The classical case would be someone who has epilepsy. If you have epilepsy, essentially one part of your brain starts speaking without any provocation and then it triggers the entire other parts to respond, and before long you have a seizure, which is the entire brain kind of speaking in concert without anyone being the adult to maintain that. And there are many ways to solve that, including drugs that you can give people that suppress the activity of this damaged part.

(Moran Cerf at 00:16:34) But if nothing works for you or you keep having seizures even though you get drugs and so on, the kind of last resort is to have a surgeon open your brain, put electrodes inside the head in the vicinity of the area that we think the problem is, and then keep you in a hospital for two or three weeks while you're connected to a computer full time. And every thought that you have gets read by a machine, including the seizure. So if you have a seizure now, we will actually see exactly where the part that is damaged is and we'll know who speaks first and why. And we'll just take this part out and take the electrodes out and close everything, and now you walk away seizure free.

(Moran Cerf at 00:17:11) That's the clinical part. Come one and says, you know what? You're already sitting here and you already have your brain open and wires inside and you're just waiting for the next three weeks to have seizures so we can see and try and get at the location. Do you mind looking at investment portfolios?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:25) Thoughts.

(Moran Cerf at 00:17:26) Yeah. Yeah. Look at portfolios and make a choice and I'll see not just what you decided, but how your brain processes investment portfolios. Or here's a new tool, like a new AI tool that you've never played with. Play with it and learn how it works. And I'll see how learning works in your brain.

(Moran Cerf at 00:17:44) I'll see what are the challenges, how you overcome them. Here's a lunch menu. There's 10 items. Choose whatever you want, but I'll see how you actually make decisions. Those types of things are extremely informative because we can see what the person says, but also the entire array of neurons that code this thought until they arrive at a decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) How much are you doing this? How often? How many people per year?

(Moran Cerf at 00:18:08) So in the world, there are, I would say, hundreds of people every year through all the clinics that go to this procedure. I have access to about seven a year. That's the number who agree not just to do the procedure clinically, but also to have a scientist show up after the procedure and talk to them for weeks and study their brain. So about once every one and a half months, there's one patient for three weeks. So it's pretty, it could be a full time, but it's not just me. Now there's other people, students, and they are the ones doing that.

(Moran Cerf at 00:18:41) But about every one and a half months for two, three weeks we have a brain that gives us a feed of thoughts. And I'll say to the audience who says, "Okay, how does that help business?" The lessons are useful. So if we learned, to take what we're doing right now, for example, if we learned how dreams work, that's the research we do right now. We have you go to sleep and we look at your dreams.

(Moran Cerf at 00:19:06) And we see how dreams work and what they're for and how they work the way they work. I can then apply whatever I learned to any person. We don't need to put wires in your brain. And if I learned, for instance, that I can make you dream about something else, I can use your dreams to make you have more creative ideas that you then apply when you wake up. Or I can inject thoughts into your dreams, all those things. Once we learn them from the open brain patients, they are useful for Joel and Moran and Josh and anyone else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) How do dreams work? What are they?

(Moran Cerf at 00:19:36) How they work we know. We knew before. So we know what triggers the brain to have a dream and so on. What we had to establish lately is what they're for. As in, what makes a dream happen? We know. It's a mechanism in the brain, in the back of the brain, that initiates a process that kind of leads to you visually seeing some stuff and so on. The question that we were after, there were two. One is, can we read them? So can I have you go to sleep and actually read your dream and know what Joel was seeing? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) You can?

(Moran Cerf at 00:20:08) Yeah. It's, to what level of detail?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) To what level of detail?

(Moran Cerf at 00:20:12) I'll tell you what the other thing is and then I'll answer. One is to read and decode dreams. One is to write. That's the big question. Can we have Joel go to sleep and say, "I would love in my dream to, you know, my grandma died and I wish I could see her one more time and say goodbye. Can you bring her to me in this VR experience? So she enters and she talks to me." And even though it's my brain putting words in her mouth, it kind of loses the thread that it knows that it's a director. It thinks it's the actor. And so you feel like you're talking to grandma and then you wake up with a little bit of closure. So now I give you this thing.

(Moran Cerf at 00:20:54) What are the two ways to read? There's one group in Japan that is kind of the poster group for this thing that puts essentially the readouts in the back of your brain. In the back of your brain, you have what we call the visual cortex, the visual area. And that part of your brain essentially is what makes you see images. So if your dreams have your best girlfriend walking and she wears a blue skirt, what this group will suggest is that you see a blue triangle and maybe a pink circle, and it will kind of describe the visual of your girlfriend the way it is.

(Moran Cerf at 00:21:30) But it would be almost like a blurry image, so you wouldn't be able to exactly know it's your girlfriend. It would be like a person walking left and right. So that's that group. And our group does something totally different. We, first, when you're awake, scan your brain and show you hundreds or thousands of pictures of people you know or places you know.

(Moran Cerf at 00:21:49) And at some point, we're going to show you a picture of your, say, girlfriend, and a cell would light up. So one of the cells that we look at will light up, say, "Hey, we showed you a picture of your girlfriend, this one lit up. Maybe this cell codes the concept of your girlfriend." Let's try to show you other pictures of your girlfriend or other women. And if the cell only lights up to pictures of your girlfriend, basically, say we found a cell in your brain that is coding the concept of your girlfriend. It's part of a network, but it's one that actually does that. And now we know that if you go to sleep and this lights up, then you're seeing your girlfriend. So we would know that you're seeing your girlfriend.

(Moran Cerf at 00:22:24) I wouldn't know if she's wearing a blue skirt or a red skirt. I wouldn't know what you actually see, but I would know the story. So I can say Joel is seeing girlfriend, the Eiffel Tower, pasta and wine. I can conjure a narrative that he and his girlfriend are going to Paris to have dinner, but I wouldn't know that. I would kind of make up this from concepts. So if you take what we can do and what the group in Japan can do, we can maybe get the full narrative, both what it is and how it looks.

(Moran Cerf at 00:22:51) But for now, it's still in the making.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:54) It's like eight bit. It's like very low resolution understanding, but you're still able to monitor it to some degree.

(Moran Cerf at 00:23:03) And I think what's nice is that then when you wake up, at least you say, "I forgot my dream entirely. I don't remember." So, okay, I'm going to give you a clue. I'm going to give you the first two minutes of the dream. It was you and someone you love in Paris. You say, "Oh my god, yes, it was my girlfriend." So by me giving you a clue, I can essentially wake up, to use metaphors from dreams, the dormant part of your brain that kind of forgot the story and help kind of get more pieces of it back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) Can anyone write?

(Moran Cerf at 00:23:31) So writing is something that we're, that's kind of what we're after fully right now. Yeah. I'll say that it's a weaker success, partially because it just wakes people up all the time. So we kind of landed on something that somewhat works, which is using olfaction, smells, and that helps. The story is that if you're sleeping and I play sounds in the room, that will maybe take you to a domain, it might work, but it also wakes you up.

(Moran Cerf at 00:23:58) So this doesn't work really. If we touch you, it sometimes works, but it kind of converts to very crude things. So we know that if I touch the leg, it makes you think like you're falling in your dream. If I pour water on you, then your dream somehow moves to a direction that has water in it, like you might dream of waterfalls or the ocean. So we know that there's some things that kind of steal the dream direction.

(Moran Cerf at 00:24:22) But what we learned seem to work best is smells, which is if I spray a particular smell into your nose while you're dreaming in the right moment, it's a small window of time. Dreams are not the entire night. It's just kind of every 90 minutes for a 10-minute window. And if the smells before you went to sleep were crafted, I tested them on you before to know that they won't wake you up and that they actually are good to drive the direction and so on, then I can get you to go in a certain direction.

(Moran Cerf at 00:24:51) The best we have right now, to kind of tame down a bit the excitement, is we can influence the valence of a dream. So you can have a dream, and I can make it into a good dream or a bad dream with smell. So very kind of crude change. This is like a two-bit thing. I can make it good or bad.

(Moran Cerf at 00:25:09) So I can't make you dream of your grandma yet, but, you know, in science we say that the proof of concept is much more important than the engineering afterwards. So to prove that I can do something was a big leap. Now it's just an engineering project to make it even better and even more fine resolution. So in a few years, come back. I'll tell you how well we did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) What do you have, like, a single tip for people that want to have better dreams in general? Like, one thing that they could do to have a better night's sleep, better dream?

(Moran Cerf at 00:25:40) Okay. So first of all, there's some useless tips, but useful tips. Useless one is have a good awake life. There's a strong correlation between, but I'll say to make it more concrete, there is something about the awake life closer to the sleep that makes a big difference. So not going to be that surprising to you, but like, if you have a really, really busy day and you can spend a few minutes before you go to sleep doing something that is relaxing and calming and kind of departing from the cacophony and chaos of the day, it's going to increase the chances of a good dream.

(Moran Cerf at 00:26:19) I'll say that, of course, if you have consistently bad dreams, you should change something in the environment, the smells in the room, the lighting in the room, things like this. And if you have a partner or a person that you can ask to be awake while you're dreaming and report to you something about how you behave when you're dreaming and so on, then you can do a little bit more. As in, you can change the time you go to sleep, because dreams happen about 90 minutes after you fall asleep and they align with the noise in the environment. So if you can craft a little bit the journey even better, it will help you even more. And I'll say the best advice I can give people that is not traumatic, like, you know, of course, if you want to really understand your dreams, go to a neuroscientist.

(Moran Cerf at 00:27:03) They will hook you to a sleep lab. They will stay awake while you're sleeping and will look at your sleep patterns, know when you're dreaming and do things. That's a bit extreme. That's something that is useful for people who actually need their dreams because they're on the verge of a new discovery and they want to maximize their ability to get insights.

(Moran Cerf at 00:27:21) For the average person who wants something, I would say write a diary. Try to keep a notebook next to your bed. And whenever you wake up and remember your dream, try to write them down. It wouldn't be long before you start seeing patterns. And the patterns would be in the content, but also in the hours and in the style. You would see that you have a bad dream when you wake up tired, meaning you had too little sleep in terms of hours.

(Moran Cerf at 00:27:47) Or you have a bad dream when the day before you were thinking about this topic and not that topic. So the diary, the dream diary, is a useful tool to start with. When we do studies with people, we ask them to do it the few days before and just show up with it. And it tends to be equally informative on things. It's very, very easy to do, not at all costly, and you'll be amazed by how quickly you will draw insights about your own experiences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) Okay. That's interesting. I want to go back to the beginning of the conversation. I have this curiosity, kind of back to the ants. The ants, there's this signal all around them that's causing them to take this behavior.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:36) You can see the ants make their actions and, you know, actually exhibit the behavior. You can't really see the signals, right? I want to know, do humans have that? Do we have a signal that is, like, it could be pheromones. It could be whatever it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) But, like, is there signals outside of us that are directing us as a whole?

(Moran Cerf at 00:29:06) Yes. The answer is in one word, yes. Let's draw more information about that. So first of all, you're right in saying that for most animals, the most important signal is smell. That is kind of the thing that they emit and communicate. For humans, it's also important. We think it's less important than it is and we think that it's not critical. Turns out it is.

(Moran Cerf at 00:29:32) So maybe I'll say it kind of clearer again. Humans, if you ask them what sense you're okay losing if you had to lose one, smell is the first one to go out and sight is the last one. People think that vision is the most important thing and that smell is the least important thing. And maybe it's making sense because of evolutionary things that made our eyes be much more useful for us. Essentially, once we stood on two feet, we took our noses farther from the ground and most smells are on the ground.

(Moran Cerf at 00:30:02) So our nose is just not where the smells are. Most animals put their noses close to where the smells are. And when dogs really want to get a good whiff of something, they put their nose in someone else's ass, because that's a very good source of smell. So we, by standing on two feet, took our noses farther and put our eyes at the top of the sensory world so we see much farther and much better with our eyes, which is why humans over time evolved to rely on eyes more, which is why our brain has 20% of its resources allocated to seeing. That said, we are a lot more dependent on smell than we know, to an extent that I'll give you a few examples in a second.

(Moran Cerf at 00:30:44) You will be shocked to learn how critical is smell to our decision making, how much of an ant are we in a way, still, and also to kind of make it a bit useful for the audience, how you can use it. So this is my kind of promise. So first, I'll promise you that, on the promise that I just made that smells are critical for us, we can start with dating. Most people, if you ask them why you like someone else, they give you a list of adjectives.

(Moran Cerf at 00:31:16) Say she's kind, he's smart, she's funny, he's beautiful is somewhere there. People try to be a little bit more sheepish about it and not put it as number one. No, she's just hot and that's why I like her. They try to kind of put it as number five, but it's definitely there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:32) It's at the top.

(Moran Cerf at 00:31:32) Yep. It's somewhere there and high enough. And the thing is what we mean when we say that is I looked at them and what I saw was appealing to me. And it turns out that more and more we learned that it's not just what you saw, it's at least in some level also what you smell. And not just what she smelled to you, what you smelled to her, but how the mix of your smell was to the two of you an indication of what we call chemo compatibility, or basically how likely are you to have great offsprings.

(Moran Cerf at 00:32:05) Now I'll prove that to you in the following way. There's a study that was done years ago now where people would show up to the lab for what they were told is a study. They arrive. So let's say Joel comes to the room. Someone says, shakes your hand, says, "Please sit down. Do you want anything to drink? Wait here for a few minutes. We're gonna call you to start the experiment." Okay. So Joel sits in the waiting room and waits to be called.

(Moran Cerf at 00:32:21) But really, the experiment began. And the experiment began the moment someone shook your hand. What happens is that in this video camera that they had in the room, they saw that most people, within a minute from the time that someone shook their hand, they take their hand that was shaken and they bring it something like this close to the nose. I'm not sure if there's video in the podcast, but if there isn't, I'm just gonna say you basically take your hand and you bring it close enough to your nose without paying attention to it so you can take a sniff into the mix of your smell with the smell of the other person who shook your hand. And what's nice about this is it's fully controlled.

(Moran Cerf at 00:33:07) So if you're a straight male and the person who shakes your hand is a female, you do that. If it's another male, you don't do that. If the person shakes your left hand, not your right hand, you will bring your left hand to the nose. If the person shakes your hand wearing a glove, you won't do that. So it's really a classical controlled experiment. But what you do is you take someone you find attractive, you mix your two hands, you basically rub it onto each other, smells that you can't really name. It's not—it's odorless. It's pheromones. So they smell like something to your brain, but they don't smell like something you can name to you. Like, you can't say, "Oh, it's lemon." It's just a whiff of basically chemicals that your brain says something about this match is good or not. And afterwards, you might say, "I find her attractive, I find him charming," and so on. But partly, it was your ancient brain that used the same thing that your dogs or your rats or gerbils use. That's kind of number one. I'll give you a second one to totally land the point that smells are critical for us. There's a study from the same group done again years ago now that showed that the tears of people emit an odor that is, again—it's an odor, it's a molecule that we don't smell, but it is kind of received by our noses and goes to our brain, and it makes the brain drop 80% in testosterone level if it's the tears basically that indicate crying from sadness.

(Moran Cerf at 00:34:42) So the simple way of saying that is you and your girlfriend have a big argument and she starts crying. It's not just a signal visually that says, "Hey, something is not right." It's actually a signal that your brain interprets as she's vulnerable right now. Drop testosterone from 100 to 28%, become more caring and empathetic. There's a twist in the study, which is like, is it the same for women's tears and men's tears? But for the sake of this simplicity, I will say tears are a way for us to emit to the people in the environment a signal that says, "I'm vulnerable, be a little kinder and nicer," which is interesting because we're one of the few species on Earth that cries with tears. Like, most animals don't have water coming out of their eyes, and you can ask the question, why did humans evolve water coming out of their eyes? Turns out this water is, visually but also chemically, a signal that tells people around us—I think it's 11 feet distance—stop being mean. So yes, we are also overgrown rats and ants.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:43) Oh my gosh. This is so funny for me. Why is this so funny? Oh, gosh.

(Moran Cerf at 00:35:49) It's unexpected, I think, but I'll promise to your audience a new closure in the following of how you can use it. I think the lesson to a CTO, to a CEO, to a leader who says, "Okay, that's pretty cool cocktail party story, but can I use that in any way?" I'll say that they need to kind of go a little bit deeper than one sentence of me saying, "But there's always ways to use it." So if you're about to go in a big negotiation meeting, having access to the odor, which you can, you know, buy it on Amazon and spray it in the room, no one's gonna notice, but it makes everyone be a little less aggressive. Right? Actually, if the meeting is all about getting people to reach a common ground and so on, you can induce a level of kind of testosterone decrease just by spraying the right scent in the room. And there's more and more of that. I'll just give you an example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:41) I'm sorry. I don't think I've ever laughed this hard in an interview before. Oh my goodness. The visuals running through my mind. Like, if I'm gonna negotiate a deal, just spraying, you know, get all these really strong investor men and just spray the odor in there, and they all turn into sobbing...

(Moran Cerf at 00:37:00) Or start crying in concert.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) Oh, if I'm like...

(Moran Cerf at 00:37:04) Let me give you another one. There are many. So this was like a—I mean, it wouldn't be surprising to you that the perfume industry is all over this thing trying to kind of distill the right ways to make, you know, women more attracted to men, men more attracted to women by injecting to the particular perfume that they're producing extra pheromones that will maybe help you get him to like you more. So that's not new. I think what's new is the understanding that we have that it actually can be useful in business. It could be useful in negotiation, in exchanges. We knew for a while that the temperature in the room makes a difference. I think that I heard anecdotally that when politicians have the presidential debates—think of like, Biden, Trump, Trump, Kamala, Trump, Hillary in the last several years—the teams that kind of lay out the exact kind of, you know, "Will they stand or sit? Will it be a 20-second response zone?" also debate fiercely the temperature in the room because it creates level of anger, it creates levels of aggression, it keeps you more alert and awake.

(Moran Cerf at 00:38:05) So they debate that as part of the discussion because they know it impacts the exchanges. I think at the same level, you can start saying, "Okay. What will be the smell in the room? What will be the odors that we allow or not allow?" And since right now it's fair game, you should definitely use it for your own advantage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) Are people actually today negotiating the temperature in the room?

(Moran Cerf at 00:38:27) Yeah. So right now, when presidential debates are being kind of discussed, one of the things that they talk about is the temperature in the room. But that's—I think it—sorry. They historically, if you go back now to the debates from the days of Nixon and Kennedy, remember there was like a big story of Nixon sweating in the room because it was very, very hot and he looked older than Kennedy. Kennedy looked youthful and kind of—and Nixon's hair was a little sweaty and so on. There was famously, I think several years ago, the debate where Mayor Giuliani was giving a speech and he was basically sweating his dye, his hair color dye. And so a lot of those kind of anecdotes happen enough times that people said, "Okay, we need to pay attention to it because the audience perceived that as a sign of weakness, as a sign of, like, incompetence and so on." So whether we care about it or not, we live in a world where it's very visual. People use not just cues from content but also from other elements to judge a candidate. Let's take care of that.

(Moran Cerf at 00:39:37) And temperature is an easy one because we know a lot about it and it's easy to kind of dial up and down. Smell's a little bit harder. But if anything is happening in your boardroom, you have people come and so on, you can do whatever you want. I think—you know, there's a field in neuroscience, totally your interview, so feel free to steer me back if you think that I'm all over the place. There's a domain in neuroscience and psychology called embodied cognition. If someone in the audience really wants to kind of go deep into that, that's the title they have to search for to learn about that. That shows that humans respond often cognitively in different ways to cues from the environment. So I spoke about temperature and I mentioned smell. In the particular study that I think launched this kind of conversation, I refer to something that's known as the temperature tea experiments, where people essentially were asked to write an essay about their mothers. So they were kind of asked to write, I don't know, five minutes of an essay about their mom, and they were given a cup of tea before they start writing the essay. They were asked to essentially hold it in their hand while they write, but half the people received hot tea and half the people received iced tea, which they again had to hold in their hand while they write. And the probability of you writing something nice and warm about your mom compared to something cold and mean about your mom varied with the temperature of the tea that you had in your hand. So essentially, people didn't say, "Okay, I don't like my mom or I love my mom because of the tea you gave me," but the fact that your body is hot makes you manifest more warm thoughts or cold ones. And it ended up with people writing an essay about their mom that was mean or nice based on...

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:29) That explains the people of the North, why they're so angry all the time.

(Moran Cerf at 00:41:33) There it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:34) Oh my goodness. Everyone's so chill in Florida. We're just like, hanging out. It's hot. You know? Up there...

(Moran Cerf at 00:41:41) There it is. Yeah. So this study, the tea, is I think the first one. But since then, there are dozens of studies that all kind of show how if the book you're holding in your hand is heavier, then you have heavier thoughts. If I make you walk slower or if I make you heavier, then you have a little bit deeper... Like all kinds of experiments that all show the same thing. It's one-line message, which is we're not just thinking cognitively purely. The environment, what's around us shapes which of the many thoughts we have in our brain gets manifested, and you can now steal that in a perfect way if you know all the cues that you can use as a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) You know, I did read a few years ago, and I've actually made decisions in my life because of it, that people—oh, man. I'm gonna butcher this because it's been so long since I've said it, but I know it. The point was the bigger the room you're in, the larger your creativity. And so like, if you're in a small little confined... So like, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're trying to think big, if you're trying to change the world, if you're trying to have these creative thoughts, you want to be in a room with higher ceilings. And so now I pick all my studios to have rooms with higher ceilings.

(Moran Cerf at 00:42:52) Not only that, there's new research, relatively new, it's I think a year old or a little bit even older, that shows that people are less creative in Zoom. If you try to have... because of the same reason. Because Zoom kind of confines your reality to essentially all you know about me right now. Think about us, we're talking on a platform that kind of gives us a video exchange. Your entire experience of me is this frame. You have no idea what's around. So you see me as a narrower version. Same for you. I don't know—you said "big room." I don't see it, right? Like, you experienced it, but I'm experiencing a very small Joel in my reality. And this means that if you say, "Hey, Moran, can you come up with an idea?" it kind of makes our brain a little bit narrow. They did a study where they asked people in a Zoom to come up with ideas or in real world where they were in a room together where they saw more, and the people in the open space had better, more creative ideas because of the same reason. It is impacting our thinking and it limits and narrows our ability to think outside the literal and figurative box.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:52) Okay. So most of—and I wanna help close the loop in my mind. It's been fascinating to talk with you because I'm asking like one question. You're answering me back, and I'm starting to kind of learn more on how to shape this. I'll tell you what my thoughts are, and you tell me how wrong I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:13) When I'm asking you this question about this like ambiguous signal we might be receiving because I feel all connected, every time you come back with, "Yes, like, there's... but the signals are interhuman." They're like things that we're doing to each other to influence each other or things in the environment physically around us, like the smells or anything like that.

(Moran Cerf at 00:44:37) So... yeah. Is that... I know what you're gonna... go ask the question first. So I guess the question, but let's see if I get it correctly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) Yeah. Is there any evidence of some signal that's like coming to us that's—like a queen? Like a queen bee, like, uh, anything like that?

(Moran Cerf at 00:45:01) So I'll build again towards that. There is no queen bee kind of per se. There isn't really one brain that is the mothership that all derive from. But there are, in every kind of group, some individuals that are elevated and they get a little bit more queen bee-ish type of approach.

(Moran Cerf at 00:45:27) Up to now, you asked questions, but I always took it to a different direction, which is I took it in environment. I said basically as if you're on your own and the room, the temperature and so on. And now you asked me the question that I think is in a way, the... I decided that, which is, okay, six people in the room, they all experience the same temperature, they experience the same smells, everything. Still, they communicate. What's going on there and who kind of gets to drive a point brainwise? So now, the neuroscience says the following. Brains, if you think of them in a very kind of detached way from the personality, are just a sponge that information gets stored in and then gets transmitted everywhere else. So you have six sponges in the room and they just broadcast stuff, intake and they keep it, process it and so on. So all that happens is like the six sponges are basically transferring signals to each other. That's what happens when you have six people in the room. Six sponges broadcasting and kind of containing stuff.

(Moran Cerf at 00:46:26) What we know is that regardless of what gets discussed, over time, within a few minutes of conversation, the brains, the sponges begin to look alike more and more. They begin to, if you want, kind of oscillate in the same rhythms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:41) Mmhmm.

(Moran Cerf at 00:46:42) That is true for any six people in the room. Doesn't matter if they agree or disagree. It's just something about the brainwaves aligns. What does it manifest, for instance, if we disagree? Even if we disagree, we speak usually at the same pace. We speak usually with the same metaphors. So we kind of use the same language. So we use the pauses at the same place. So even if we are arguing, it's like three lawyers from one side, two lawyers from the other side arguing in a contract. The fact that they're in the room at the same time and talking to each other means that they create a shared reality that they all align on, and they didn't agree on that kind of cognitively. They didn't say, "Okay, let's all speak using these words at this pace and so on." It just happens naturally. And when they leave the room for a few minutes, until they sponge it themselves with other brains, they will carry this room and they will still kind of do that. And if one idea in this room emerged that was very resonant with all the other six, it will dominate and it will be taken to the other room. And when they speak to other brains, this idea will be carried over, so you can spread ideas essentially this way if you convince the entire room to have a shared reality.

(Moran Cerf at 00:47:51) Shared reality is this vague term that's kind of hard to explain. But I gave you an intuition on that, which is it's a set of vocabularies, a set of metaphors, a set of thinking approaches that people share after they had enough time to sync their brains. And it's remarkable to see how fast it happens and also to what extent it happens. The experiments that I'm looking at right now, for instance, suggest that you and I who come from different backgrounds, different experiences, liberties and so on, if we now spent, I don't know, let's say 20 minutes talking to each other, we created this reality.

(Moran Cerf at 00:48:32) Something about our brains is if someone measured your brain and my brain, they would see that we're syncing in the same way. We would respond to a third thing that happens right now. If something startles us, it will startle us in the same response time, in the same way. The same parts of the brain will light up. Something happened in those twenty minutes, and if your audience has, say, millions of people who have been with us on this twenty-minute journey right now, even though they listen to it in different locations, different time zones and so on, their brains are aligned with our brains right now.

(Moran Cerf at 00:49:02) And if an idea comes here that is particularly useful, we just changed millions of brains in a way that will spread to other brains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) That's big. Okay. I know we're coming up on time here, but I'm getting better questions now. Alright. So I hear you. The new question. I look at the ants, and I see them. They're obviously building to some sort of goal, and they all end up building this thing, whatever it may be. And I can say, okay, I know when a group of ants gets together, they build towards this ultimate outcome. So if you ask me the question, what are the ants building? I'll be able to tell you because I'm an ant expert and so on and so forth. If I am standing on the moon, and I am looking and I'm an alien, and I am looking down at the humans, tell me what are the humans building?

(Moran Cerf at 00:50:06) So I'll give you vague and concrete. Vague is order. We're building order. We're taking mess, large-scale mess, and we're organizing it. That is, from the outside, what humans have done. And a more concrete one is building intelligence. That is, if someone looked at what happened to the world from, you know, let's say nearly five billion years ago, or fourteen billion if you go to the beginning of time, the world became more organized, especially in our neck of the woods. Not just by putting the cups back on the shelf, but generally, we're countering everything that evolution says should be true with one kind of activity, which is organization. To make it very visceral, if you take a glass and you put, say, salt at the bottom half and pepper at the top, and you start shaking it, it's going to become homogeneously mixed. And even though in principle, statistically, there's a chance that if you shake it enough, it's going to end up exactly with salt at the top and pepper at the bottom or reversed, effectively, it doesn't happen. You can shake it for fourteen billion years and somehow it always stays chaotic. And basically, thermodynamically, balance is the physical term for that. But the second law of thermodynamics says that things become, if you talk salt and pepper, become equally mixed. Somehow, humans did the opposite. We took salt and pepper that were supposedly disorganized and shook them enough and ended up with half salt, half pepper. That is what humans are. That's what consciousness is. Somehow, our brains have this magical thing which is they are more organized and our planet is more organized than you would have if you just let things happen randomly. This defies all the rules. It makes religious people believe that there is God. It makes scientists who don't believe in God say that statistics have a way of favoring solutions that are evolutionarily fit. And this is why even though you shake the pepper and salt every time and there's one reason for this particular piece of pepper to be in the right place, so it stays there and it draws more and more. We found a way to explain it to ourselves, but if someone looked from the outside, they will say this is what's unique to this planet and this is the meaning of all of this planet and this is why even if you live and die, you contribute. So your life as an ant seems less meaningful in itself if you don't think of it from the outside as you contribute to creating this order. To tie it to your audience's journey as a modern tech leader and so on, I would say that when you think of yourself as a part of this bigger picture whose job it is to create order, that is I think what companies do. They take a problem which is mess and they try to think, how should we organize the salt and pepper? And can I do it? Can I move one piece and make it organized? And when you think of it like that, maybe it gives a little bit of sense of mission or meaning to people's jobs, which is we are helping organize. That's what it looks like on the outside, and specifically in our modern day, it's information. We organize information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:29) So what are comedians doing when they're running their comedy sets?

(Moran Cerf at 00:53:33) I think that they remind us first of all what the meaning is. People tend to forget. And I think that by putting a mirror in front of you, it's a good reminder. I spoke about dreams and I said people sometimes have to spend a few minutes before they go to sleep calming yourself down. It's how comedy does that in a way. They say, you know what? It's easy for us to get in the grind of getting upset that this person was appointed to my boss when I don't think he's qualified, or this person is taking it in a different direction and so on. And a comedian puts things in perspective. That reminds us, okay, first of all your problems are not as big as you think they are in relative terms. Second, you can make fun of them which means that if you can laugh at your own problem and your own thoughts and so on, it means that you are reminded that it's very common and shared to humans. The fact that you see other humans sharing that makes you realize that everyone has this thing. So if they tell a joke about, I don't know, something that happened with their spouse or so on, and you laugh but also hear other people laughing in the room, you realize that he or she experienced that, you experienced it, and so did ten others. And I think it's a very powerful thing. And to tie it again to the neuroscience, laughter is an act that is very much the outcome of shared brains. The fact that you and I don't know each other, but if someone says a joke, we laugh at the same time means that we both have a shared sense of thought. The comedian didn't say blondes are dumb. This would not be funny and he didn't say that. He just told us a joke about a blonde and he stopped shy of the punchline and we had to say in our brain, oh, she said that because she is dumb. Oh, blondes are dumb. And I said that. He didn't say it, but he led me there. So I feel guilty that I thought that even though, and then I solve this moment of discomfort by bursting in laughter, which is our brain's way of saying it's uncomfortable for me and I have to spread it out. And the fact that you do the same says okay, he also has the same train of thought because he didn't say blondes are dumb. Both me in my brain and he in his brain said it. We both laughed at the same time, so it means that we think the same thought, means that this guy knew how to lead us there. That's, I don't know why you asked me. It was a surprise question to me, but it's a great reminder, I think, for us that this is a lesson about shared reality that is grounding everyone. The CEO, the person who just started yesterday, laugh at the same jokes about the same topics, meaning they actually have some shared understanding of the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:05) It's interesting. Yeah. The shared understanding of the environment. Like, if you see a good comedian, if everyone had to stand out in the cold for thirty minutes before the show and they address that at the beginning, they're saying, like, hey, I'm a part of this group here that I of the room I walked into. And so that's actually really interesting. I will tell you this.

(Moran Cerf at 00:56:28) And to answer one thing that you said before that I'll tie nicely, they become, for a moment, a queen bee. Right? Whoever gets to make all their brains, for a second, feel like they're a team, automatically gets a queen bee-ish characteristic, which is we tend to give them more attention for a few more minutes. We tend to like them more. We tend to think that they're smarter. We tend to think that they understand us, empathetic. So a lot of things happen when someone is able to make multiple brains feel like they're aligned. I stopped you from asking something, so I'm just going to hold it there, but this was a reminder.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:03) This is good. Well, I will share this with you. I have been asking this what are the humans building question for five to seven years, and I have never gotten an answer that made me feel like there was resolution until your answer today. So thank you for this.

(Moran Cerf at 00:57:22) This should be clipped, and that should be the only thing that we should have to ask. Like, why bother wasting people's time for an hour listening to us? Just have them say, here's the bottom line, Moran is a genius.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:31) I agree with that fully. I'd stand behind that. I'd gladly give you any recommendation anytime you ever need one. This was amazing. I would love to have you back on next year if you would like to do that.

(Moran Cerf at 00:57:46) Joel, I'm yours. I could not believe it when you said that we're almost out of time. I just looked at the clock and said, wow, it's been an hour. So it's a good suggestion that it's aligned brains when you feel the time didn't pass.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:00) 100%. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Moran Cerf at 00:58:04) Wonderful. I did not know where we're going to go, and I'm so glad that you ended there. So I could imagine you asking me mundane business questions. What are your three pieces of advice to a business leader tomorrow? And the take from neuroscience, I think, is it feels great to talk about it. I enjoy it a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:24) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.